Loren Herzog may be dead, but the outcry over his placement in Susanville continues.

Susanville and Lassen County are proceeding with their lawsuit challenging the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's placement of Herzog, Wesley Shermantine's co-conspirator, who lived in a trailer on the grounds of a prison in Susanville, with little notice that he was coming.

"It's something that is so important to the city of Susanville ... that we ought to have an answer," said Peter Talia, who has been representing Susanville and Lassen County. The state prison had been asking the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento to reverse a Superior Court decision that had ordered Herzog transferred out of Susanville.

After Herzog died, the Attorney General's office filed a brief asking the Court to drop its appeal on behalf of the prison. Lassen County authorities reported he hanged himself outside his trailer earlier this month.

Shermantine, his boyhood friend, sits on death row in San Quentin State Prison, having been convicted of four murders.

Herzog, once convicted of three of those murders, saw his sentence thrown out on a technicality, then pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the 1998 killing of Cyndi Vanderheiden. He was paroled in 2011 into Lassen County.

Residents of the area opposed his presence there and won a Superior Court ruling to remove him, but the state appealed to the state Court of Appeal. They were awaiting a ruling when Herzog took his life.

"Now that Mr. Herzog has died, there is no longer any actual controversy at issue here," state Deputy Attorney General Anthony O'Brien said in a written brief to the court.

Talia, however, says officials in Lassen County don't want the appeal removed. "Because we asked for two things," he said.

One was that Herzog be relocated outside the county - that is no longer a concern. The other was that the court finds the state department didn't follow proper procedures when it notified the county of Herzog's release just two days before.

O'Brien's response to that issue is that the Legislature has already resolved the problem by changing the notice requirement from "no less than 24 hours after" to no more than 24 hours after selecting a parole location.

But Lassen County officials say that isn't enough.

"I want a court declaration ... that we did not get 45 days' notice like we should have gotten," Talia said.

What does he want to accomplish with it? "Simply that it does not happen in short notice again to this city or any other city," Talia said.